Home Health & Hospice Week

Help your staff to build on their competencies.

Don’t wait until the Patient-Driven Groupings Model is already upon you to try to whip your staff into shape. Now’s the time to enhance the performance reviews you give your employees — and get better results.

“Only 44 percent of line managers and 45 percent of HR professionals believe their companies’ current performance-management systems deliver value to the business,” Jennifer Forgie, managing partner at OnPoint Consulting, says in a statement.

What does this mean for you? If you have flawed performance evaluations, your employees will never be able to improve their performance.

Use these tips from OnPoint to beef up your performance-management skills before your agency is in a crisis situation:

1. Your performance appraisal should include essential elements of “fairness, accuracy and value to the business.” Here are some characteristics that you want your performance review to have:

• Your review system should help your employees improve and build up their skills and abilities.
• Your system should allow you to set performance goals with your employees.
• Your rating scales should allow you to differentiate your employees’ performance levels easily and accurately.
• Your performance reviews should help you instill peak performance as a value and mission of your department.
• You should be able to derive usable data from your review that you can use for planning and leadership development.

2. Work with your employees to establish goals, development planning, and performance evaluation. Coaching your employees in these areas effectively is essential for you as a supervisor, says Forgie. When you help your employees set goals and when you give regular feedback, you have a basis of discussion for your performance review.

If you have no goals or feedback, you won’t be able to give an accurate end-of-the year appraisal, says Forgie.

3. Have regular performance-review meetings instead of once a year. The best performance review systems “require or encourage quarterly or periodic review meetings,” according to OnPoint.

Forgie recommends having regular “check-in” meetings with your staff to let them know how they’re doing and what they need to work on. Ask them to set a goal for the next check-in meeting.